HTML 5 Game Development Experiments

After finishing the engineering class website I was tasked to work on over winter break, I decided to use the last week of vacation to improve my JavaScript skills. I decided working on a simple game would be a nice way to relax and still get some programming practice in.

I had used Phaser in the past for CactusHack 2015 (hosted by TucsonJS) where my group managed to take 2nd place thanks to our bravery in attempting a game in 24 hours. I suppose participating in LudumDare events in the past has given me a bit of agility when it comes to learning new game frameworks and implementing basic gameplay.

Sadly Phaser, despite having a lot of great features built in, suffers from a lack of up to date documentation and demo code. Additionally, because the library seems to have undergone quite a lot of change over time, many of the internet searches I performed while looking for basic functionality were for older versions of the library.

Eventually I decided that I ought to check out Pixi.JS (the library that Phaser is built on top of) upon hearing chatter around the internet that it was a much better library than Phaser, although being a bit harder to learn initially.

What I’ve found, however, is that Pixi.JS is much more intuitively designed, and performs much better for games that involve simple logic. After spending about 3-4 hours with the library I’ve created a very simple game here to demonstrate what is possible. I however did use the wonderful BigInteger library by Peter Olson to allow quick score calculation and to store the large resulting integer for the later stages.

1/14/16 - I have since spent quite a few more hours adding a few more elements to the game such as a threshold mechanic, and smoother animations.